Andrea Westermann (ETH Zurich, Institute of History) has a nice review up on H-GERMAN (cross-posted to H-SCI-MED-TECH) of Richard Olson's new book, entitled Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite:
The book under review deals with the "transfer of ideas, practices, attitudes, and methodologies from the context of the study of the natural world into the study of humans and their social institutions"
(p. 1), a process Richard Olson refers to as "scientism." It does not deal, as one might expect, with the history of the natural sciences and their popular reception . . . Olson traces a history of those European ideas and social theories which, relying on the authority of natural science, earned some measurable political influence at the time: liberalism, socialism, positivism, communism, and social Darwinism. As with his earlier works, Olson aims at showing that modern Western political culture, religion, and literature are beholden to the body of knowledge the natural sciences accrued over time. In short, the book argues that, from the late eighteenth century onward, a basis in science was the driving force in the reasoning about and the political development of social organization.
This is interesting, because the conception of scientism that I have discussed on MH Blog is entirely different from Olson's usage here. Westermann comments on this:
Olson's need to summarize specific advances in the natural sciences in order to explain what exactly had been transposed into the social realm distracts from a straightforward line of argumentation, and so does his defense of the meaning of "scientism" against the views of rather dated epistemologies (such as that found in Friedrich August von Hayek's pejorative perception of "scientistic" approaches).
Hmmm . . . dated? I am dubious, though I certainly would not choose Hayek as a key expositor of the notion of scientism addressed here. Nevertheless, the whole review is well-worth reading.
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